All To Jesus I Surrender

     I didn’t grasp the meaning of a surrendered life until I was sixteen years old. In January of 2015, my family went to a revival meeting at a nearby church and the evangelist preached on missed opportunities. He had a few different points he talked about but the one that spoke to me was missing the opportunity to live for Jesus. I realized that the path I was headed down was going in the direction of pleasing myself, not following him, and at the altar call I went down and told Jesus that he could have all of me. 

     It was a bit scary, to tell the truth. Of course right then I felt buoyed by the emotions of the moment but I knew that the years ahead would not be a bed of roses. Being a pastor’s kid all my life I had seen plenty of people come and go - some who shone brightly for a while but then burned out, some who were dear friends but turned into back-stabbers, some who seemed genuine but never grabbed ahold of God’s vision for them, some who watched from a distance but wouldn’t come to God themselves, and praise the LORD, some who stayed the course no matter what howling storms beset upon them. This was my observation from seeing all that: God is trustworthy, he is Almighty, and he is good. There isn’t anything in him but good. What sacrifice to give him my all when he did that for me on the cross? ...thus the “real” beginning of my journey with Christ.

     The definition of surrender, according to Webster’s 1828 dictionary, is “to yield to the power of another”. Not unlike the surrender of one army to another in battle – in living surrendered to God one must lay down his own weapons, his own feeble human forces of thought and might, in favour of his LORD’s unmatchable, undefeated strength. Given that this life is a battleground, it’s a fitting analogy. In the words of the apostle Paul as he wrote to his son of the faith, the young preacher boy Timothy -

1 Timothy 1:18, 19, “... War a good warfare; holding faith, and a good conscience; which some having put away concerning faith have made shipwreck:”

2 Timothy 2:3, 4, “Thou therefore endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier.”

     And of course there’s Paul’s admonition in Ephesians chapter six, to “put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil” (verse 11). Definitely no stroll through the park, indeed!

     As the song goes that my dad liked to play in his days as the DJ for a Christian radio station, “It’s a battlefield, brother, not a recreation room; it’s a fight and not a game... so run if you want to, run if you will, but I came here to stay.”

*this dorky pic is the only one I could find of me in 2015;) with my bully Lab, Liberty Belle.